Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life

At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudo scientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, astonishing new research is revealing patterns in human behavior previously thought to be purely random. Precise, orderly, predictable patterns.

The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Ge­nius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

This audiobook explains why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm - that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.

The Smart Swarm

In a world where speed and flexibility are valued more than ever, leaders from the corporate boardroom to the military are looking for answers from seemingly unlikely experts - the ones in the grass, in the air, in the lakes, and in the woods. In this innovative audiobook, veteran National Geographic editor Peter Miller shows how swarm species, such as ants, bees, and fish, can teach us to tackle some of the most complex conundrums in business, politics, and technology.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: 25th Anniversary Edition

Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers - those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Hacking: Ultimate Hacking for Beginners, How to Hack

So you want to be a hacker? You want to know how to get into a system and look like a genius while you spot system vulnerabilities. In this world, you can either be a good hacker or a bad hacker. Whichever that is totally depends on your choice. This audiobook teaches ethical hacking and guides anyone interested to an in-depth discussion about what hacking is all about. This book also provides the right hacking mindset that will turn you into a trustworthy hacker.

On Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.

Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

In Calculating the Cosmos, Ian Stewart presents an exhilarating guide to the cosmos, from our solar system to the entire universe. He describes the architecture of space and time, dark matter and dark energy, how galaxies form, why stars implode, how everything began, and how it's all going to end. He considers parallel universes, the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, what forms extraterrestrial life might take, and the likelihood of life on Earth being snuffed out by an asteroid.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber - these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins - except traditional cab companies, which are scrambling to survive.

A groundbreaking investigation of the brain's hidden logic behind our strangest behaviors and of how conscious and unconscious systems interact in order to create our experience and preserve our sense of self.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change.

Now: The Physics of Time - and the Ephemeral Moment That Einstein Could Not Explain

You are reading the word now right now. But what does that mean? What makes the ephemeral moment now so special? Its enigmatic character has bedeviled philosophers, priests, and modern-day physicists from Augustine to Einstein and beyond. Einstein showed that the flow of time is affected by both velocity and gravity, yet he despaired at his failure to explain the meaning of now. Equally puzzling: Why does time flow? Some physicists have given up trying to understand and call the flow of time an illusion.

Manish Kataria says:"A book with good beginning that fizzles out in end"

The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life

In The Social Organism, Luckett and Casey offer a revolutionary theory: Social networks - to an astonishing degree - mimic the rules and functions of biological life. In sharing and replicating packets of information known as memes, the world's social media users are facilitating an evolutionary process just like the transfer of genetic information in living things. Memes are the basic building blocks of our culture, our social DNA. To master social media - and to make online content that impacts the world - you must start with the social organism.

When Computing Got Personal: A History of the Desktop Computer

This is the story of how a handful of geeks and mavericks dragged the computer out of corporate back rooms and laboratories and into our living rooms and offices. It is a tale not only of extraordinary innovation and vision but also of cunning business deals, boardroom tantrums and acrimonious lawsuits.

Publisher's Summary

From a cocktail party to a terrorist cell, from an ancient bacteria to an international conglomerate - all are networks, and all are part of a surprising scientific revolution. A maverick group of scientists is discovering that all networks have a deep underlying order and operate according to simple but powerful rules. This knowledge promises to shed light on the spread of fads and viruses, the robustness of ecosystems, the vulnerability of economies - even the future of democracy.

Now, for the first time, a scientist whose own work has transformed the study of "links and nodes" takes us inside the unfolding network revolution. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi traces the fascinating history of connected systems, beginning with mathematician Leonhard Euler's first forays into graph theory in the late 1700s and culminating in biologists' development of cancer drugs based on a new understanding of cellular networks.

Combining narrative flare with sparkling insights, Barabasi introduces us to the myriad modern-day "cartographers" mapping networks in a range of scientific disciplines. Aided by powerful computers, they are proving that social networks, corporations, and cells are more similar than they are different. Their discoveries provide an important new perspective on the interconnected world around us.

Linked reveals how Google came to be the Internet's most popular search engine, how Vernon Jordan's social network affects the entire American economy, what it would take to bring down a terrorist organization like al Qaeda, and why an obscure finding of Einstein's could change the way we look at the networks in our own lives. Understanding the structure and behavior of networks will forever alter our world, allowing us to design the "perfect" business or stop a disease outbreak before it goes global.

Engaging and authoritative, Linked provides an exciting preview of the next century in science.

This was, in retrospect, critical for me to listen to. It provides a framework for understanding complex natural systems.
Network theory has seen a boom recently and this book by one of the founders of modern day 'scale free network topology' theory lays it out in plain english (except for the name, I guess). Beginning with Euler's theorems he follows through his own research and that of others to construct a picture of how network architecture arises, what factors affect it, and it's strengths and vulnerabilities. The theory is supported with examples of real networks (businesses, hollywood stars, the brain, the internet, and the spread on AIDS).
The theories also make sense, there's a real feeling of 'ah-haa' in every chapter as layers of complexity are added on. This seminal work describes the basis of a theroy that will be the starting point for a deeper understanding of the world around us.

This is a thorough discussion of network theory. The first part of the book goes into great, and sometimes tedious, detail. If you have the patience to wait for the cake to bake, however, the frosting is quite tasty. The second half of the book is about applications and real-world examples of every sort of network you might imagine and several you probably won't.

Reductionism is at the heart of the scientific process, but in the end, we must be able to reconstruct a complex system from its basic components in order to understand its emergent behaviors. Such behaviors frequently go unexplained. The realization that complex systems that appear to be chaotic and random actually follow quite simple laws that is mathematically quantifiable cuts across a multitude of disciplines. This book is not just about the internet, although it is certainly discussed. It is more about a possible paradigm for explaining how and why complex systems demonstrate a self-organizing capability. Although it can be quite dry listening, this book presents the listener with an insight into what the next century of science has to offer.

I'm a Network Admin by day, astronomer by night... this book will touch on every aspect of your scientific mind whether you have one or not. I'm always amazed by our modeling of nature; Networks are no exception.

Linked is a good review of network theory at just more than an introductory level. I particularly enjoyed the historical review of the developments in the body of knowledge for network theory. The last section, where networks in all aspects of life were examined, was a little long -- where I would have "fast read" or skipped ahead if I had been reading instead of listening, but other than that it was well-narrated and worthwhile.

I listened to Linked and then went on to read the Tipping Point and Smart Mobs -- two other books on networks / social networks. They often used the same examples, but with less detail. Linked gives a historical perspective that is useful and interesting. I was familiar with the notions of 6-Degrees and 80-20 beforehand, but now understand much better how they relate to one another and when it's appropriate to use them.

I got a couple of hours into this audiobook and was thinking, "So?". There wasn't much there except a mathematical history lesson and some networking theory I already knew from years on the web. So I went back and listened to it again and caught some insights I missed the first time. The author links some disparate theories and industries and brings them together into a whole that is, while not groundbreaking, still a worthy addition to your non-fiction audiobook collection.

The book recounts the history of such things that have entered the common lexicon like "six degrees of separation". Overall I enjoyed the book although it didn't blow me away like Mind Wide Open or On Intelligence.

I'm not a scientist or a mathematician, and this book reminded me why. It was a bit dry in places, and the math often seemed to prove the obvious - that networks are not always random, but rather some nodes are more connected than others. Could have been said in a much shorter format. Also, it seemed to confuse some issues, like web pages vs. Internet infrastructure. Still, this book gave some interesting things to think about.

It's been over a year since I listened. While it was a most interesting listen, I was non-committal about the conclusions. But over the past year the book's ideas keep coming back to me. As I watch the way things unfold in technology, economics, politics and more, I am often reminded of the book and must conceed to the truth of its theories. Witness for example the evolution of ebay in the two years since Linked was published...true to form indeed.

There are very few books that tell so much information in such a lucid way. This book is about one of the most important subjects in science and it is written in a way that is amazingly easy to understand. Quite an achievement.

This is a fantastic book and one I have come back to and re-listened several times. The ideas presented here are just so fascinating. I never dreamed I would like this book so much. It's over six months ago since I first heard it but I still think about, and talk about, it a lot. This is not a lot of high foluting scientific stuff you can't understand, quite the opposite - it's clear, it's endlesly fascinating and relevant to everyday life - well my life anyway! After you've heard it you will be dying to play the Kevin Bacon game!

The narrator is great too. A pleasure to listen to.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Craig Fisher

UK

7/23/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Wonderful read, great subject area,"

The book has a good pace with relevant depth, background and incite, allowing access to a new area of study for me, well worth a read

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

bhavna

london, United Kingdom

11/9/11

Overall

"The Book is really good and worth Reading"

The Book is really good and worth Reading , as this is said it is really a good book with lot of information.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Matthew

Netherend, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom

7/5/06

Overall

"Tediously labours the point"

The points made are interesting but the author makes them time and time again and labours the point too often.

I don't know if he is trying to flesh out what should have been a briefer book or doesn't have confidence in his ability to explain the subject matter in a manner that the audience can understand.

I ended up becoming frustrated and thinking 'I know, you've said so five times already' when listening to this audiobook and is the only one I?ve not listened to all the way though. I think an abridged version would have been better!

There are far better science books out there about Emergence in my opinion - even though few are on audiobook yet.

0 of 2 people found this review helpful

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